But as an Indian, I find it far easier to forgive than to forget.
While God waits for his temple to be built of love, man brings stones.’ Or
We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from...
We must not be deluded into making concessions, whether on Kashmir or any other issue, in the naive expectation that these would end the hostility of the ISI and its cohorts. We must understand that P...
Tolerance, after all, implies that you have the truth, but will generously indulge another who does not; you will, in an act of tolerance, allow him the right to be wrong. Acceptance, on the other han...
The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.
The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legisl...
The joke is that one Bengali is a poet, two Bengalis is an argument, three Bengalis is a political party,
The highest officers in the government had the strongest motives to corruption, and therefore could by no possibility attempt to check the same corruption in those below them…
The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India, staking...
The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels...
The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods, of too low a quality, at too high a...
The Indian vessels, a contemporary British observer wrote, ‘united elegance and utility and are models of patience [sic] and fine workmanship.’ Indian workers were considered expert in all shipbuildin...
The British used the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ to refer to British people living and working in India, and ‘Eurasian’ to refer to those of mixed parentage, usually the children of lower-ranking Europeans an...
So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.
Sir Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the British in protest against ‘the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India’. Tagore’s early ambivalence about the costs and benefi...
She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.
My friend Keerthik Sasidharan suggested to me, in twenty-first-century terms, that Hinduism is analogous to an open-source operating system on top of which others can build applications to be deployed...
It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of mil...
It is true that a Hindu without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card, and is subject to many of the same disabilities.